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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26844850">One More Soul To Keep</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoru'>LocketShoru</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Saint Seiya, 聖闘士星矢: 冥王神話 | Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Grief, Love Languages, Other, Pining, Sagiverse, Saint Seiya Rarepair Week 2020, Unhappy Ending, musings, no beta we die like gold saints</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 13:22:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,753</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26844850</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoru</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>[Day 2: Language of Love / Grief &amp; Sagiverse] They loved him, and they knew he loved them, and that love transcended language, transcended blood, transcended the space of starlight and their time together. The problem is only that death has no mercy, and it comes for everything mortal in the end.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Pisces Cloth &amp; Dryad Luco, Pisces Cloth/Original Male Character, Pisces Cloth/Pisces Raitis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>One More Soul To Keep</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Clarification on the warnings: this is a fic where Pisces bitches about the fact Raitis just died.<br/>Pisces Raitis is an OC! He's Luco and Lugonis' dad, obviously, and the Pisces Saint before them. His TH is <a href="https://toyhou.se/6451127.pisces-raitis">here</a> if you want to read more about him.<br/><a href="https://twitter.com/kagesagittarius/status/1313274642199703552?s=20">Kiril's side is here</a>!<br/>I don't really expect this one to get many views, but shoutout to those of you who did click on this one!</p><p><i>Note:</i> If you want to know more about Sagiverse, go <a href="">here</a>. Written by Luteia.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They teleported back to Sanctuary when the ones who had found them had buried him. That was all they could have asked for. But they'd waited with him, waited for the reapers to take his soul. The raven that had done the job had whistled until someone mortal had taken notice, and had waited with the two of them until Raitis had been discovered.</p><p>When they had seen him buried by those he'd saved, those who had seen him lead off a few of Hekate's Witches before he'd died, they had returned to their temple. They were both lucky and unlucky, for what they had returned to see.</p><p>Lugonis and Luco had been raised well. They should know, most of all: they had been there the entire time, having handpicked the two from the house of a fair woman too deep into poverty to have given them anything. It was a mercy, to take them off of her hands, regardless of her opinion of it. She would survive a little longer, not having to care for any but herself. It was more than enough, yes.</p><p>Raitis had been delighted to find them in his garden, swaddled with one of their spare capes and woven into a basket of rosevines to keep their heads from falling back. Concerned, yes, at who might leave a pair of newborn twins in his garden of death, but delighted all the same at their survival, and the very idea of 'finders keepers', as he so eloquently put it.</p><p>They would have loved him forever, if they had been given the chance. They would have serenaded him through every long night of the Holy War, drank his tears into the metal plates of their skin and flesh when he wept for the friends he hadn't managed to save. They would have called their own immortality to him, weaving their goddess' cosmos through his in a parody of her <em>Misophetamenos</em>, until he could stand as immortal as they did.</p><p>He'd understood them. He'd loved them. There wasn't anything else he could have been. He took them with him wherever he went in the temple, allowing them to stay in the form of a fish, settled nicely in a large glassblown pan, chin-deep in water. He'd purchased the pan in Venice, noting the sparkle of interest at something so lovely. They hadn't expected him to buy them a souvenir, but he had. He'd been glorious, that way.</p><p>They'd wanted him to know he was loved. Wanted him to know that he was the best of the children they'd raised and played like chess pieces, that he was better than even the gentle Lady Pisces, the first of them all. She was still the archetype for them, and he looked nothing like her. But they'd rolled the dice enough times. Raitis had been Finnish and blond and a bit on the dashing side when he bothered to shave, and he was too different from her to keep.</p><p>If they had known the first human they'd ever chosen for war was the personality and face of the bearers they would always have, they probably wouldn't have chosen her. Lady Pisces had been gutsy, but she never had the will they needed for war.</p><p>When they'd woken still screaming, cosmos sparkling in silent despair, Raitis had always woken with them, risen from his bed and went looking for them. He would always find them where he'd left them for the evening, in the aquarium-room designated more as a throne room than anything else, and he would pull them from the water to take them back with him to his own room. He'd had a knack for knowing their forms, even the ones currently forbidden to them, and he would arrange each of their limbs properly into their bipedal form, and cuddle up to them, resting his back against their breastplate. He had always been happier that way. Perhaps he had always known how much they enjoyed it, too.</p><p>So now, Luco had quietly gone and picked them up, and taken them to Raitis' room. He and Lugonis had sat with them, sharing a plate of dinner, the silent vigil of knowing he would never come home. In the morning, they would announce his death to the Pope - the traitorous man, who knew Lady Athena was more merciful than she ever had any need to be to love him again - and Pisces would guide them to where their master and father had been buried, and one of them would take up the mantle of Pisces Saint.</p><p>It was going to be Lugonis. That Pope would never have allowed Luco to do it, and that was fine by them, because Lugonis was the one that needed to be kept in line. Lugonis was the one who needed a tide to keep his cove closed. Luco would stay as long as they told him he needed to. Lugonis, who had seen his father kept, who did not forgive them for keeping his brother, needed more of a push if he was going to stay. And they were both too powerful to be left alone.</p><p>It wasn't as often as they liked that a child was born with the right combination of traits to allow them immunity to Pisces' poison. When such a child was born, they almost always had to sweep down and take them, regardless of the difficulty of the task, if they didn't want to wait another thirty years for the dice to roll correctly again. So many children, and there were never enough to consistently have a bearer half the time.</p><p>They feared Lugonis would be their only gauntlet of cards come time for the Holy War. They feared it almost as much as they feared night coming without Raitis curled up next to them, having placed their gauntlet over his ribs, allowing them the trust he'd always given them to keep him safe.</p><p>They had not kept him safe, and he was gone. Their Raitis was gone, and he wasn't coming back.</p><p>Luco turned out the lights with a flick of his wrist, allowing Lugonis to take their dishes back to the kitchen. He hesitated, just a moment longer after his brother had left. They'd eaten in silence. His eyes were unknowable to them, known only when Raitis bore them as the armour they were, but his cosmos was laced and woven with sorrow, stars glittering only enough to show he was breathing. Breathing, and mourning, and grieving. He would not need to leave the Pisces Temple for quite a few days. Pisces almost dreaded the companionship.</p><p>"I guess he really is gone," Luco said, and they could hear him enough to recognize the regret in his voice. "You knew him better than we did. I hope he fought bravely, even if it wasn't enough for you to think him worthy of being saved."</p><p>They would have blinked and frozen in surprise, if they had a face, or the ability to move through Hades' curse. It had not been because they hadn't loved him that he was gone. They flared their cosmos, alighting the stars of their tail. <em>No, Luco</em>, said those stars. <em>I did not save him, because... I could not.  Even I, Luco, have limitations</em>.</p><p>Luco's starlight in return darkened with his unhappiness. He understood them because Raitis did, because Raitis had loved his boys enough to teach them how. Raitis had spent years talking to them, learning how to tell the difference between a yes and a no, a comment and a question, until language between them had been nothing more than silence, broken by his laughter.</p><p>Nyx had no power over dreams, and neither did Athena. But one night… Someone, likely the Virgo, whatever her name was before she'd turned to darkness and had needed to be put out of her misery, had opened the ley lines of what the Aries Saints typically called the cosmos byway, and they'd cast their spells through it, wedging their fins and the stars of their power across the woven lines that made up the byway, and took Raitis with them into it.</p><p>They landed in a glade, the water of the stream running into a delta around them. Their boots were graceful on the spongy-but-not-muddy soil, sinking easily into it. In front of them was Raitis, blinking, in his usual tunic and trousers and barefoot, not at all having expected the shared dream Pisces had pulled them both into. Nyx didn't have the power. Athena didn't. Pisces never could have made the journey alone. But really, when had the Virgos ever acknowledged such a thing as what they could and could not do?</p><p>They had some questions for their fellow cloth, if they would ever be able to speak to each other again. But ah, right now they could see and speak and move, and their attention was focused on Raitis. Fortunately, his attention seemed mostly focused on them just the same. </p><p>"Pisces," he said, acknowledging them. "I think I'm dreaming. Is this your dream too, or did my mind conjure this up? You don't usually look this way."</p><p>They stood a little straighter, noting that their cape was attached not to their pauldrons but to their tassets, a proper skirt of a thing, which so few of their bearers acknowledged was the only way to wear a cape fashionably. "Do you like it?" they asked, stretching out their gauntlets. His expression was that of someone who hadn't expected them to speak.</p><p>"Well, yeah- of course I do," he stammered in response. They would have smiled if they could, and only managed a twitch of contentment of their cosmos. Facial expressions were still a while ahead of them. Still, he rose from the rock upon which he was seated, and stepped over to them. They took him gladly into their gauntlets, pulling him in, slipping their gloves around his hips. Here, they were taller than him, the two inches dictated by the heels of their boots. He looked up at them with eyes bluer than anyone's, and all they could even manage was to lean down and kiss him.</p><p>They could have kissed him forever. The ways of it weren't often described, and any human would have found it impossible without doing it. Their body was metal and rivets and jewels, and they felt sensation the same way humans did, with a few changes. Pain was dulled. Even being shattered was not enough to force them to black out into unconsciousness. No, that was a favour reserved only for a very sensitive point at the small of their back, the only place where a slight press would render them unconscious for hours. It had originally been designed for the Lady Athena's use, to render a cloth quiet in the case that they decided to be angry with her.</p><p>It was that point where Raitis had been shot with an arrow, and they could no more have deflected it than a human could have survived their entire respiratory system ripped from them. He had fallen, and they had not been able to turn the arrow aside. It was that point, in this dream years before that had ever happened, that Raitis brushed his fingertips across, unknowing of what it meant when a shiver ran down the back of their breastplate as they kissed him.</p><p>Cosmos against flesh. His lips were chapped and worn, the lips of a man who had never kissed anyone in his life and spent a remarkable amount of time out in the hot daylight of the garden weeding and arguing with the roses. They could have taught him to speak to them, if ever he'd realized there was a language there to be learned. Cosmos was a difficult type of magic to make solid for more than a brute-force technique, burning and hot and fizzing on the skin. It was enough to render it solid enough to make it feel as though they wore the metal flesh of their body, and did not simply inhabit it: so long as he closed his eyes, he could reach to any part he reasonably could have expected a body to be inside the armour of them, and their cosmos would feel him.</p><p>Humans had auras of cosmos, shifting the leywork of the world as they moved. Those auras and their souls didn't always stay directly inside their bodies of flesh and bone and blood, but they typically stayed close. So too did their own aura of cosmos not always stay inside the metal of them, inhabiting all the spaces of empty air where a human might also be, if they wanted one to.</p><p>Raitis reached a hand up halfway onto the back of their gorget, and halfway on empty air just below the back of their helmet. The cosmos of that air firmed under his touch, sending a pleasurable feeling through them. Once he discovered where their truly sensitive spots were, it would be over, and it would be nothing but a matter of seeing how long they could keep the dream together while he distracted them.</p><p>The kiss deepened. His lips parted, enough for them to brush cosmos just inside his mouth, their gloves slipping down his hips and reaching for his thighs. They were not going to stay vertical for long, and his kiss had the slight taste of desperation to it. As far as they were aware, he still had no idea if they were truly here, or simply a conjuration of his mind. It made some questions unnecessary, and they were glad for it. They were never very good at flirting, anyway.</p><p>	Raitis broke the kiss, not for long, just long enough to ask, "Are you truly here? I don't often dream lucid, and this feels a bit more real than I usually do…?"</p><p>	Pisces only flicked the fin on the right side of their helmet. "It is not often I have a gateway to the byways I require for such communication. I am no longer capable of moving as I please in the waking world, and this is as close as I may. I would ask your forgiveness for the intrusion into your dreams, if your reaction did not render such questions unneeded."</p><p>	A corner of his mouth twitched in amusement. They answered by pressing another kiss to the movement, stealing a kiss that quickly became mutual. They would have kissed him forever, if they could have.</p><p>The byways never lasted as long as they wanted them to. When Raitis awoke from the dream, Pisces' power exhausted from the effort of maintaining it for as long as they had, he had found that his body was of the opinion it had physically been there. The lines between realms were never as clear-cut as the mortals liked to think they were. Pisces was waiting when he appeared in the doorway of the aquarium-room, dressed only in a pair of pants they knew for a fact he'd left on the floor a few days ago.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>He dove into the aquarium without a thought for his clothing or his ability to breathe, reaching them in a matter of seconds and curling up around him. It was a trivial thing indeed to cast the spell he would need to keep breathing underwater - roses were not, after all, the whole of their capability - and he pressed a kiss to their helmet. Their answer was nothing but more pleasure, the water currents slipping past them and Raitis' arms around them. They couldn't move or swim around, take joy in it as they were once able to, but they could allow the water around them to push them down into his chest and a little forward to return his kiss.</p><p>Underwater was the best of all. They couldn't swim, but they could move the water currents around them, and they could offer him the ability to breathe, reaching their cosmos to brush against his. They were not so close as they could theoretically get, melting their cosmos together until they didn't know where one of them ended and the other began, but they were close. Some things did not require their goddess to bleed, and she wasn't here to even hear their request, if they asked it of her.</p><p>Luco's sorrow, suddenly deepening, drew them out of their memories. They pulled their attentions free of the water to focus on him, feeling the undercurrent of his sorrow shift into the darker waters of anger. They wanted to comfort him. There was no comfort they could give that he would be willing to listen to.</p><p>The raw grief of Raitis' loss, combined with their failure to save him, crashed over them again like a wave. They were exceptionally talented at ignoring the grief, when they wanted to be. One does not spend four thousand years almost constantly at war, sacrificing human after human, without learning how to detach oneself from the grief. There was nothing they could do now, but salvage what was left.</p><p>Luco's cosmos made its way over to them, guiding himself by the wall until he was close to the bed where Raitis had slept and would never sleep again. They wished, not for the first or the last time, that they could see his face, that they could shift into their bipedal form and pull him into their breastplate. If he wept now, allowed his heart to lighten, it would not turn traitorous, running after the byways of death that he could follow but never travel more than once. If Luco left them too, so soon after Raitis, it might break them.</p><p>His fingers brushed the metal of them, pushing them up until their helmet met the pillows, and their fins settled against the sheets. A moment later, Raitis' comforter fell atop their dorsal fin.</p><p>"I would sleep in here tonight," Luco murmured, his voice nothing but defeat, "But I think you deserve that, right now. I don't know if I can forgive you, for not saving him. But you knew him best, and for tonight, I get the feeling you'd rather be in here. You usually are. Master dislikes it when you sleep apart from him."</p><p>His cosmos disappeared through the doorway before they could stop him. They couldn't so much as burrow into the sheets. But they could still breathe, if not physically enough that anyone save for an Aries, or Raitis himself, could have noticed. So they breathed in his scent, all roses and seawater and icy winds, and wished they still had their movement, so they could shift forms and bury their helmet in one of his pillows.</p><p>Raitis had always preferred the left side of the bed. They had taken the right, and curled up around him, allowing him to move their limbs until they were both comfortable. Sometimes, in their dreams, they would take him across the waters for a night of dancing, never falling in unless they wished it. And some nights, they cared not for using their dreams to walk, and only spent the night cuddling, taking advantage of the freedom of movement.</p><p>It had taken years before they had figured out an acceptable position to spoon and kiss at the same time. Pisces was happy with just about any position that allowed them to all but glue themself to him, finding clothes an affront to their affection, and Raitis preferred not having a pointed metal edge driven halfway through his thigh. But they loved him, and were willing to make concessions, and eventually they had agreed they were both happiest when Raitis was on his back and Pisces settled themself halfway on top of him, enough to kiss him and to allow their gaze as much of him as they wanted, and he could fall asleep knowing they were between him and anything with teeth or dangerously-sparkling cosmos.</p><p>Even when the byways weren't open to them, and all they had was cosmos and occasionally water, he still preferred to sleep with them between him and the door.</p><p>Lugonis, who favoured sleeping with his face in his twin's pectorals, would invariably ask if they intended that he curl up with them as Raitis did. Maybe one day, if he wished the physical contact. They had no heart, nothing but a jewel set into their gorget that was far, far more sensitive than any cloth would admit to, but the heart they didn't have still needed time to heal before anyone could hold them the way Raitis did.</p><p>They had once heard a Spectre whose face was familiar to them snap and tell their bearer to never speak a certain name again, for it would be a thousand years before they could hear the name and not start to cry. For the first time in longer than they could recall, they understood the sentiment. It might be more than a thousand years before they could hear the name 'Raitis', or catch wind of anyone whose voice sounded like his when they laughed, and not strike them dead on the spot.</p><p>Cloths didn't - couldn't - cry. The closest they could ever manage was to expunge a little bit of their cosmos, more than a sigh, less than a sob. As far as the twins who would take up Raitis' position could have said, Pisces was all but bleeding cosmos. Their fellow Gold Cloths would recognize their weeping for the grief it was.</p><p>They had brought him a pair of twins, once, taken from a mother who was better off alone. Raitis had recognized the gift, and claimed them as his own. They had never belonged solely to him.</p><p>With the way Lugonis looked to the horizon, and the way Luco looked at what was inside their small sanctum, they were not sure how long they could hold onto them. The timing of it was a cruelty they had previously attributed only to Hades.</p><p>One way or another, if they did not lose the twins to their counterpart surplice and the cruel darkness of the Meikai, they would be forced to offer them up as pieces on the chessboard of the Holy War. It wasn't something they ever wanted to do to Raitis' children, to be prepared one way or another to sacrifice them in a war for the peace and safety of the world. </p><p>Nor was it something they ever wanted to do, to their own.</p>
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